July 14, 1999

IBM's Lucente to Join Soliloquy, Inc.

Move Will Strengthen Company's Leadership in Natural Language and Computer Speech Technologies

Soliloquy, Inc., a leader in natural language technologies for e-commerce, announced today that Mark Lucente, Ph.D., a senior research staff member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, will join Soliloquy immediately as the company’s Vice President of Engineering.

"Mark will be a brilliant addition to our management team," notes Catherine Winchester, Soliloquy's CEO. "His vision matches ours perfectly. Like us, he wants to create next generation user interfaces which support intelligent dialogue between people and computers. Mark’s goal of making access to digital information as natural and efficient as talking with your best friend mirrors our own mission."

"I am lightening-bolt-down-my-spine excited about joining Soliloquy," Lucente says. "Computers get more powerful year after year, but now it is time for computers to get smarter — and more fun. Soliloquy's natural language technology is the first step to creating an experience that is fun and effective, and may even help everyone who uses a computer feel a little smarter, too."

Lucente is joining Soliloquy after four years at IBM, where he designed and built computer systems endowed with "eyes," "ears," and other "senses" that become a natural part of work and home environments, allowing users to communicate and to understand information simply by talking, gesturing, pointing, or walking around a room.

Lucente decided to join Soliloquy because of the exciting future he foresees for natural language and computer speech technology, a belief shared by Winchester and Dr. Nathaniel Polish, Soliloquy's co-founders. "Catherine and Nat are amazing entrepreneurs and visionaries and, by combining forces, we will make Soliloquy a huge success," he adds.

Mark's DreamSpace — a smart room that combined cutting-edge interface technologies — made a big splash at Comdex '97, where Mark demonstrated the fun and usefulness of natural multimodal interfaces in entertainment, education, scientific visualization and information management.

Before joining IBM in 1995, Lucente worked for six years in the MIT Media Lab in their Spatial Imaging Group, where he and his colleagues invented 3-D real-time electro-holography. He learned his university degrees (Ph.D., S.M., S.B.) from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Soliloquy creates chatterbots for e-marketing and customer service on the Internet. Soliloquy’s chatterbots are natural language front ends to e-commerce databases, allowing people to hold intelligent 2-way dialogues with web sites either by typing or speaking. Soliloquy mission is to humanize e-commerce and customer support through improved user interfaces that are conversational, interactive, and friendly, rather than simply passive.

For pictures of Mark, please see the following URLs:
http://www.research.ibm.com/research/images/lucente1.gif

http://www.research.ibm.com/research/images/lucente2.gif

For higher resolution:
http://www.research.ibm.com/research/images/lucente1.tif

http://www.research.ibm.com/research/images/lucente2.tif